The insurance sector has always been one in which we have worked highly successfully, with many of the world’s leading insurance providers deploying our Augmented Intelligence solutions to extract actionable insights from the unstructured data that they hold.

This market heritage and deep understanding of the sector meant that the recent InsuranceCom event in Zurich was one that we couldn’t miss. It was attended by senior decision-makers from across the industry and attracted a powerful line-up of speakers, and the event is regarded as one of the leading information pools and best practice exchanges in the entire industry.

Representing Squirro at InsuranceCom were our Sales Director Ivano Salogni and our Senior Sales and Business Development Manager, Katharina Kreitner – here are some of their key takeaways from the event and how they will affect the insurance industry in 2020.

Innovation is vital for the sector’s future success

Throughout many of the panel discussions – moderated by Prof. Dr. Peter Maas, Member of the Board of the Institute of Insurance, University St. Gallen – at InsuranceCom, a recurring theme was of insurance as a sector that faces two stark choices.

One is to innovate and adapt to the new market reality, utilizing technologies such as AI and data analytics to give themselves competitive advantage – the other is to continue the status quo and watch as market share is eroded and traditional insurance providers fall by the wayside.

This is especially true in the Commercial Insurance, Reinsurance, and Commercial Underwriting, areas within insurance that have traditionally been the most conservative. Business leaders understand the urgent need to innovate, but the ability to do so is another matter entirely. Faced with legacy infrastructures and a risk-averse mindset, insurance innovation can be a challenge, but smart insurers are starting to look at other ways of innovating.

New business models are emerging

One of the debates at InsuranceCom was ‘Emergence of Consumer Driven Business Models’, which focused on the need for the entire sector to look at new ways of approaching familiar challenges. This can include insurers embracing innovation by partnering with start-ups, who have the expertise and technology solutions to help those insurers move forward with confidence.

This approach helps navigate some of the issues that insurers face in developing their own technologies. By creating and developing new eco-systems, populated by partners that understand their challenges and have proven solutions to meet them, insurers can innovate and get the maximum return on the data they hold.

This model is one that Squirro is particularly suited to. Insurance has been a core sector for us ever since we launched, so our teams have a deep understanding of the issues insurers are facing and what is needed to overcome them. We have the agility to provide highly focused solutions in response to specific requirements and are comfortable working as a partner to insurance firms.

Our technology is inherently scalable and easy to integrate with other systems. The value it offers in terms of managing and working with unstructured data is unparalleled within the industry, which is why it has proved so popular with insurers including Axis Re, Helvetia and Swiss Re.

Customer experience is more important than ever

Another key theme was the importance of the customer experience. This is becoming the key battleground for insurers, both consumer-serving insurers and B2B sector. Customer expectations have changed radically over the last decade and insurers need to meet those expectations.

It is a key factor to make more effective use of the data they hold. Insurers hold more data on their customers and the broader market than ever before. Whether it’s premium data services, breaking news or social media, much of the really insightful data is unstructured and unable to be managed by most CRM platforms.

Squirro adds structure to unstructured data, meaning that insurers can benefit from the insight within it, to deliver an improved customer experience, enhance the underwriting process or to drive lead generation.

But without the right infrastructure, executing these types of services just isn’t as feasible. That’s why Squirro has partnered for so long with AWS, providing the best platform from which we can deliver that key customer insight.

Optimizing the Commercial Insurance Customer Lifecycle

The InsuranceCom event was hugely illuminating and also offered great encouragement that Squirro is ideally positioned to help insurers overcome the main challenges they are facing, particularly when it comes to delivering a first-class customer experience.

This is something we will be focusing on in our upcoming webinar, ‘Optimizing the Commercial Insurance Customer Lifecycle’. It will take place on 27 February and explore how insurers can empower their people with key technology applied to the right data, and in doing so gain a powerful and meaningful understanding of their customers.

With Squirro’s Augmented Intelligence solutions, human intelligence is combined with AI, allowing all the data to be utilized when making important business decisions. Anyone joining the webinar will learn how to improve customer services, be better secured against disruption, and maximize growth and profitability across the value chain.

2020 will be an important year for insurers as they seek to deploy the latest technologies and improve the customer experience. To register for our upcoming webinar please visit here.